This invention relates to an improved user interface for a relevance-ranking, abstract or document retrieval computerized system.
Document retrieval deals with the problem of how to search for documents relevant to a user's given information need. A relevance-ranking, full-text document retrieval computerized system is the type of document retrieval system that addresses this problem by first transforming a user's information need into a query, and subsequently matching this query with the full text of all the documents in the document base that is to be searched through. The document texts are subsequently sorted on their correspondence to the query, and a higher correspondence is then considered to represent the documents that are more relevant to the given information need.
A known relevance-ranking, full-text document retrieval system described by Sanderson et al. in a paper published in Electronic Publishing, Vol, 4(4), 205-217, December 1991, entitled "NRT: news retrieval tool", the contents of which are incorporated herein, has a user interface that basically consists of a display of three parts: a query window, a results window, and a document window. In the query window, a user can enter his/her query typically in the form of multiple significant words, herein called "query words"; in the results window, s/he can see the results of the search (the result is a list of supposedly relevant documents); and in the document window, sometimes called the viewer window, the user can browse through a particular selected document. In the result window, documents are displayed in order of relevance.
Displaying for the user only these three windows does not inform the user of the underlying strategy of the retrieval system: s/he is neither able to see nor to influence which words in his/her query are taken seriously in the search and which not.
Hence, the published NRT provides to the user the weights of the query words in an additional words window. In the words window, all displayed query words are sorted on decreasing weights, while these weights are represented as sliders or as bar indicators. In this way, the user can see the weights of the query words prior to the search itself, and s/he is even able to modify the weights if necessary.
However, there is an important disadvantage of the NRT system. This disadvantage is that even those four windows are not able to give the user sufficient information as to how the query words individually contribute or relate to the documents ranked in the results window. For instance, if the query words are, for example, A and B, the user cannot see from the display whether a document listed in the results window is relevant because only A occurs in it, or because only B occurs in it, or because both A and B occur in it.